The Price Of Sanity
by millennium-night
Summary: The doctors of Arkham finally broke Jonathan Crane's will, leaving him as a rather desperate man.


_Disclaimer: I don't own any of the mentioned characters. This was written purely for fun._

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"You're cured," the doctors had said, "and as long as you keep taking your medicine, we guarantee you it'll stay this way."

All of them had stood in a long row in the seemingly endless, clinically white corridor and all had shaken his hand firmly as he went past.

The last in the line had been his personal psychiatrist who had handed him his belongings, or at least what was left of them. Everything presumably 'dangerous' for his environment and his own mental condition had been removed, of course.

Now Jonathan Crane was sitting on a bench in Gotham's Central Park. The damp wood was uncomfortable to have contact to, yet it felt like a place of refuge.

It was an especially cold winter day - about late November, as he had read on an old newspaper which had peeked out from a dust bin.

In Arkham one quickly lost all sense of time.

An icy breeze made him shiver and his bare, numb fingers wrapped the woolen scarf once more around his neck before he hid them in the pockets of his much too thin jacket again. His breath formed barely noticable white clouds which whirled up the tiny dancing snowflakes in the cool air.

Very few people were around - yet already too many for his taste - and again one of them, a man in his late thirties, approached his bench. He looked at the skinny figure that was Crane and, after a brief moment of hesitation, he quickly walked by and finally sat down on an empty bench which was as remote as possible from Jonathan's.

Ha, the way all of them stared at him!

Of course they recognized his face, it had been shown in the news too often, after all. They were afraid, afraid of him - the Scraecrow, the Almighty God of Fear!

Except for the fact that this was not him any more.

Their fear caused no pleasure, no familiar feeling of sick satisfication, and instead he was even _embarrassed_ by the stranger's stares.

No inner voice chided him for this silly feeling, no second persona backed him up. His thoughts were empty, hopeless and somber.

Two months had passed since he had last felt the comforting presence of his alter ego - the doctors had expelled it from his mind with their strange 'advanced' pills.

First, they had forced them into him, then, as they had started to lower the guard of his will with every day, he had taken his _medicine_ alone.

Because they had told him so.

Because there had been no one to prevent him from doing it.

It had been a horrible time, perhaps even the worst of his entire, miserable life, and luckily he only posessed a blurred memory of it.

Being separated from the Scarecrow, his guiding companion since childhood, was as if someone had torn his soul apart, leaving it incomplete and damaged.

Would these wounds ever heal?

He had always been convinced of doing (or rather having done) no wrong, but now he was not so sure any more. Was it possible that they had been right all the time, that he actually was (had been), as a matter of fact, _insane_?

Neither could he believe it nor did he want to. He was not ready to judge his deeds properly yet.

Anyway, what could he do now? With a history like his, no one would give him employment, and without money he could not start a new life - he could not even afford a dry, warm place to sleep at the moment! All the knowledge he had gained was useless, he realized. A waste of time, as had been his life as a criminal.

He used to have a career as a successful psychiatrist and university teacher, so what happened?

Terrifying people, fighting the Bat - for what?

_Nothing!_

Nevertheless and as a matter of fact, he could not help but miss this time, his former self, the Scarecrow. At least he had been happy, had been content since his life had had a meaning.

"You're cured," the doctors had said, "and as long as you keep taking your medicine, we guarantee you it'll stay this way."

Jonathan Crane stood up, approached the riverside railing and threw the glass of pills as far as possible into the cold, on-rushing water.

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_A/N: What can I say, I just wanted to write something sad. Now I feel almost a little sorry for him. XD_


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